EU election
- Thread starter Satinavian
- Start date
Firstly: share value is supposed to be based on the ability of the holder to liquidise it and get that price under existing supply. That's where the "extra" value comes from: purchasers of the share.
Secondly: share value may be used to determine the applicability of a wealth tax, but the government is not going to be receiving share value. Its going to be receiving money. Money which is coming from the existing supply.
It's delusion to just endlessly consume fossil fuels-- finite, globally-destructive, reliant on despots across the globe-- when alternatives are readily available.
What exactly is making it so impossible to increase energy generation from renewable/nuclear sources? I mean, numerous countries have already been able to shift large proportions of their energy source from fossil to renewable/nuclear. They've literally already done it, in a matter of years, with the investment and political will. What exactly makes it "delusional" to demand other countries kick-start that same journey?
How many of those places produce all their own things? Probably none. How many of them bought a giant pile of stuff from China, with materials sourced from around the world, to beef up their renewables? Probably all. You can't just suppose that if every place had the same political will they could all do the same thing at once when the thing in question involves global resource limitations.
Oh, its an unacceptable cost to import materials to build renewable capacity, is it? The same countries would otherwise be importing oil and gas from Russia, Saudi Arabia etc. Importing materials may be required for some. That's a drop in the ocean and leads to greater self-sufficiency long-term, as they're then able to generate their own energy in the future.
And for the record, Germany-- which has significantly increased its renewable energy proportion in a short timeframe-- also produces a great deal of the material itself. The US is more than capable of manufacturing this stuff, and doing so would also be a potential job boom.
Once again, "everything must happen immediately and simultaneously and thats unattainable" is a laughable strawman designed to discourage any progress towards the goal.
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I feel like you understood the point based on what you said after this, this sentence is missing the point by a mile though. It has nothing to do with imports being bad and everything to do with imports not being the answer for everywhere all at once.
No, it isn't. As always, you are not the sole perspective left of center, talking about a left-wing perspective you don't personally have does not make it a strawman. You can try to laugh off the existence of crazy people all you want, it only makes you look silly.
And why are those theoretical limits of what would happen if everyone wanted to transition to all renewables at once any reason to slow down our current transition now ? We are certainly very very far away from that becoming a problem.
Way too many people do.
And the "but we can't switch all at once" argument conveniently pops up every time people talk about actual practical measures to distract from possible steps in the right direction. Instead of talking about what can be done and actually doing it, if forces associations of green transition with impossible goals and proponents of it with delusional fantasts.
It is a classic misdirection. It is not the only one in the arsenal of the fossil lobby, but a well known one.
It actually does not matter that not everything can be done at once. What matters is what can be done, where obstacles are, how to solve them, how to pay for it. And then to follow through.
For example we know that the loading infrastructure in many parts of Europe is not there to go fully EV soon. We also know that the grid would have trouble supporting it. Usually that should spark measures about expanding the grid and provide loading stations to be ready. Instead people want to push EVs further into the future.
But imports of fossil fuels, on and on and into the future, remains the answer? Continuing fossil fuel addiction requires a far greater scale of importing.
I'm not the sole perspective. But I can look at the green parties and the environmental movements as they actually exist, and engage with their perspectives. And none of them-- none of any note-- are pursuing the line you're ascribing to the green movement. Its a line manufactured by its opponents to undermine it.
I'm not the sole perspective, but you're entirely unwilling to engage or understand with the proponents, so I have a great deal more awareness of the others.
They want to keep things comfortable for themselves until they're safely dead and in the ground, and the rest of us can live in the hell their obstructionism has created.
"We should wean ourselves off of fossil fuels and seek sustainable alternatives to beef."
"They want us to live in caves and eat bugs!"
The argument here "popped up" because political parties with elected representation are advocating for the end of nuclear power generation. If the conversation about steps in the right direction includes turning off clean energy from a power grid that needs to expand significantly to cut out fossil fuels, it's a dumb conversation, and we need to excise that dumb before anything else is considered.
With its nuclear plants, France uses barely any fossil fuels for electricity, but they still use plenty for heating and transportation. If they want to cut those things out, they need electric vehicles and heat pumps, which will drive demand for electricity way up. We need more energy to be clean and sustainable, not less, and that's not going to be accomplished in any of our lifetimes without nuclear.
Nuclear power is a separate issue. And while some green groups strongly like/dislike it, i don't see any advocating to shut it down in contact of transition off fossil fuels.
As for the future, no, expanding nuclear is not going to solve much. It takes way too long to build, is nowadays more expensive than wind/photovoltaics in most situations and, most importantly, we don't have enough uranium to satisfy significant parts of the world energy needs. It is useful to keep the existing plants running but that's it.
That is why it rarely enters conversation.
As for the future, no, expanding nuclear is not going to solve much. It takes way too long to build, is nowadays more expensive than wind/photovoltaics in most situations and, most importantly, we don't have enough uranium to satisfy significant parts of the world energy needs. It is useful to keep the existing plants running but that's it.
That is why it rarely enters conversation.
unless you count the workers that were exploited to generate the profit (or, indeed, the expectation of profit) which is the underlying reason that people want to own stocks.
Transition to renewables takes time and resources. The more you need, the longer it takes. Turning off nuclear makes phasing out fossil fuels take longer.
Nuclear is more expensive than renewables because one is immensely and expensively regulated while the other is subsidized. The two also have different optimal use cases in different places, no solution is perfect everywhere. We do have the uranium in hand to last a century right now, we know of enough uranium to power the world solo for billions of years.
Nuclear must never come into your conversations, as you seem to have zero knowledge of it.
Good hing then that i never advocated for turning them off.
Not if we build more nuclear plants all over the world. If just the majority of actually plants that are now in an early planning stage are built, we run out of (reasonably accessable) uranium in 20 years. Which is less than all those plants even plan for. And we would need even far more if we want to solve the energy transition by using primarily nuclear.
I am physicist who actually took part in conferences about nuclear power plants and future projects and perspectives. And i worked in particle physics for several of my postdoc years. Unless you have a PhD specifically in nuclear physics specifically, my credentials regarding that topic are likely way better than yours.
As a PhD you are probably accustomed to citing your sources. I am curious about potential uranium. Do you have a source on it lasting for 20 years?
I also wonder what you think about ITER?
Unfortunately not. I have that from a couple of talks from people working at the IAEA about projections of future nuclear usage at conferences in Dresden and Berlin not quite a decade ago. So it is not even completely up to date, but i have not heard of any significant developments changing the conclusions.
Cautiously optimistic.
But it is obvious that fusion won't be ready in time to play a significant role in combating climate change. ITER itself was delayed again, a proper start is estimated in 2034. And this is still just a test reactor and much has to be changed before industrial usage can happen. Generally the history of fusion research is full of delays and overly optimistic estimates so so others are more pessimistic. But if all goes well, we might see a building start of industrial fusion plans in the late 40s. But it is also possible that, when we finally can do it, people prefer sticking to the then more established and entrenched wind and solar.
Also there is still the fact that there are a couple of competing approaches to fusion and we don't really know which one will eventually triumph. There is a chance that ITER will end up in the footnotes of science history, no matter how compelling the project sounds.
Tell me why this is wrong: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
Google says there are plans for a 20-30% increase in the number of reactors worldwide at the moment. Where are you pulling 20 years from?
Credentialism is a trap to make smart people say stupid things. You are saying stupid things right now, and don't imagine how that could be, cause of the credentials. Open your imagination to your own limitations.